RIP Higgs Boson (with 95% confidence) • Hacker News Board

Re: RIP Higgs Boson (with 95% confidence)

#151

Post by wlievens » Thu, Sep 01, 2011, 7:48 AM UTC

ebrenes wrote: post #145

wlievens wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is the GSP receiver a consequence of GR (honest question)? I know internal clocks of the satellites have to compensate for time dilation, but to be honest I don't see why that couldn't have been 'fixed' with an empirical solution devoid of theoretical basis. After the first launch, of course.

I think the empirical solution would not be as straight-forward as you proclaim. Namely, because lacking any clear understanding of the science any number of theories might crop up that attempt to explain the perceived anomaly thus hindering efforts at finding a workable solution. Some of the emergent theories might actually lead to declaring outright that the concept is flawed and unsolvable. On the other hand, havi…

I'm not disagreeing that a conceptual framework is superior.

But I picture it like this, in my very naive way.

1) launch satellites

2) after some time, engineers notice the clocks keep running behind/ahead (I always forget)

3) engineers debate, and have no clue what's happening

4) engineers build fix to re-synch the clocks every 24 hours or so

5) gps system works fine, engineers remain puzzled

And then of course

6) after years of puzzlement, some kid figures out what's going on

Re: RIP Higgs Boson (with 95% confidence)

#152

Post by ebrenes » Fri, Sep 02, 2011, 2:35 PM UTC

wlievens wrote: post #151

ebrenes wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the empirical solution would not be as straight-forward as you proclaim. Namely, because lacking any clear understanding of the science any number of theories might crop up that attempt to explain the perceived anomaly thus hindering efforts at finding a workable solution. Some of the emergent theories might actually lead to declaring outright that the concept is flawed and unsolvable. On the other hand, havi…

I'm not disagreeing that a conceptual framework is superior. But I picture it like this, in my very naive way. 1) launch satellites 2) after some time, engineers notice the clocks keep running behind/ahead (I always forget) 3) engineers debate, and have no clue what's happening 4) engineers build fix to re-synch the clocks every 24 hours or so 5) gps system works fine, engineers remain puzzled And then of course 6) a…

I can definitely see it playing out that way.

However, my limited knowledge of the problem precludes me from understanding if a simple 24 hour re-sync would address the underlying problem.

From what I do understand the accuracy/precision of the GPS system would be affected. I'm also inclined to believe that even with a regular re-synch, the overall usefulness of the system would be affected. As I don't believe the re-synch itself would be exempt from the underlying problem.

What I do know is that given our better conceptual framework we're able to leverage very precise location information; this leads to a more useful and productive GPS system than we would have otherwise.

Re: RIP Higgs Boson (with 95% confidence)

#153

Post by sskates » Fri, Sep 02, 2011, 9:45 PM UTC

guygurari wrote: post #110

sskates wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I'm missing something, but how is this argument flawed? Bayesian probability says that eliminating possible universes increases the probability of other ones (given everything else as constant). So reducing the probability that the Higgs Boson lies in some energy range (which is what this experiment did) increases the probability that a) the Higgs Boson doesn't exist and b) the Higgs Boson exists at some other…

I think we should be careful with Bayesian inference for the usual reason -- there is only one universe with one (or zero) Higgs particle. You can't really collect statistics over universes, so what is the meaning of probability in this case? More concretely, what prior probability would you assign to the distribution of the Higgs mass? This depends on your theory. For instance, supersymmetric theories tend to favor…

I'm not saying there's a 95% chance the Higgs isn't there. I'm saying there was some non-zero probability that it was in the specified energy range before, and given these results the probability that it's now in that range is now 5% of the value it was before. Or more precisely, the probability that we're in the universe where the Higgs is in the specified energy range and it's detectable with this experiment just went down to 5% of it's original value. Even if we can't accurately identify what the value of the probability is, we can still say it went down to 5% of its original value on the basis of the evidence from this experiment. I would also argue that prior to this experiment the probability of the Higgs appearing in this energy range given our state of evidence of how the universe works was significant (more than 15% I'd say) otherwise we wouldn't have built the LHC. I understand you can't say this with a frequentist approach because we don't have a sample of universes to draw on to estimate priors.

Finally we're not talking about the probability of some state of the universe in the absolute (as frequentists claim, we can't meaningfully talk about such things), we're talking about some state of the universe given the evidence we have.